Industry-university cooperation – IEDEC 2011
March 16, 2011, IEDEC, Santa Clara, CA—Rich Goldman, vp at Synopsys described the challenges of staffing up remote facilities with productive graduates. He also talked about the interventions that Synopsys and the government of Armenia make to the educational systems to address the challenges.
One aspect of their efforts is to update the curriculum every year and refresh the lectures, syllabus, labs, and other course work current. The courses lead to bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate level degrees and include practical and functional work. As an example of some lab work, students have created a generic 90 nm iPDK, libraries, and all other views and models so other schools can work on designs without the need to buy these materials for their own designs. The students have created an open access set of libraries and added a SPARC processor and a Power 405 processor to the library. New courses will address a similar set of libraries for a generic 32 nm process.
The school has published modular text books in 4 different languages so instructors can pull pieces from various modules. These efforts are overseen by an advisory board to ensure relevance to the university and to industry. The quality of the course materials is evidenced by their adoption at other schools around the world. The courses are formatted as short courses, full lecture series, and seminars.
This mix of corporate, state, and academic entities is demonstrating its value through increases in the electronics design industry in Armenia and in the increasing demand for graduates from the university. Now the basic model is expanding to other areas. The school is collaborating with schools and industries in the European Union, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt. A different model is starting in India where much of the course work in on the Web. Through networking with other universities, they are able to expand their offerings and update their curriculum with results from state of the art research.
